1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to displaying stored data using a web browser. More specifically, the present invention relates to using conventional web browser technology to view stored data over the World Wide Web, where the data is not stored in a format normally compatible with such viewing.
2. Background and Related Art
The popularity of the Internet has profoundly improved the way people communicate by allowing users quick and easy access to information. By accessing the World Wide Web and electronic mail through computers and other devices, people now stay in touch with each other around the globe, and can access information on a virtually limitless variety of subjects.
With the ever-increasing use of the World Wide Web, there is a need to efficiently display data stored in a variety of differing formats using a web interface such as a web browser. This includes simultaneously displaying data where the data is stored in formats that are not natively compatible with display using a web browser.
Current methods for displaying non-web data in a web format use data collection products, such as Active-X®. While such products are capable of displaying a variety of data formats, the products require the client to download control modules from sources other than where the data is stored and to have the client process the control modules before any data may be accessed. This downloading places additional traffic on networks, such as the Internet, which consumes network bandwidth. Additionally, this results in consumption of the resources of systems that use such data collection, where these resources may be used for other operations.
Another method for accessing such data would be to write a separate application program or style sheet for each view of each different type of data. However, this would result in large quantities of application programs or style sheets, which would require extensive development time and would be burdensome to manage. Additionally, when new data formats are created, new style sheets would have to be developed to access the data.
Accordingly, what are desired are systems, methods, and computer program products that facilitate more efficient Web access to data that is not natively compatible with a Web browser, and where changes to the layout on the Web browser are more easily realized without extensive recoding.